Forever
by darkestboy
Summary: Rose and the new Doctor's relationship takes some getting used to. Set after Journey's End.


**Name: **Forever  
**Characters: **9th Doctor, 10th Doctor, Metacrisis Doctor, Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith, Jackie Tyler, Pete Tyler, Jake Simmonds, Daleks (cameo), Cybermen (cameo), The Master (cameo), Davros (cameo), Autons.  
**Synopsis:** Rose Tyler has come to know three versions of the Doctor but can she live with the one she's been given? When an army of Autons rise during the new year, Rose begins to realise that she does love this Doctor. Post _Journey's End_.

"So you travel in time and space all by yourself in a police box?"

The question had sounded a lot more sceptical than it had meant to. Scepticism was probably a trait that Rose was going to need to kerb if she was going to travel with this man. At first she had fought the temptation but then she remembered kissing Mickey goodbye and leaving Earth with a man simply known as the Doctor.

"Well, to be fair, I'm not on my own anymore," the Doctor smiled, using his Northern lilt to effectively point out that he was pleased to be in her company. "I've got you, Rose Tyler."

This had been moments before they had arrived on Platform One. Other things they had experienced in a short space of time had included the end of the world as well as a meeting with Charles Dickens and some Gelth before the Slitheen nearly destroyed the whole of London.

In 2012, there had been an emotional altercation with a lone Dalek. Rose had actually taken the creature's side because at the time, even she had been unaware of the dangers that such a race posed.

When Jack had joined the TARDIS, the dynamic had certainly changed. They had gone from dynamic duo to terrific trio without taking time to process it all. It was another encounter with the Daleks en masse that had really changed things. The Doctor made the error of sending her home to keep her safe.

Something like this was never going to sit well with Rose. Instead of obeying him, she enlisted her mother and Mickey's help in getting the TARDIS opened, flying it all the way back to the space station. Imbued with the time vortex, she wiped out several Daleks but the consequence had been for the Doctor to regenerate.

"I just wanted to say, you were fantastic and you know what? So was I."

With that, the man she had grown to love in over a year literally changed before her eyes. In his place stood a skinnier man, with a manic glint in his eye. The Sycorax had attacked over Christmas Day but he was too powerless at first to help them. When he did come around, Rose had realised that while the Doctor could change his features, he was still the same man she had known all this time.

"This was our first date." She smiled as a memory of apple grass sprang to mind.

"We had chips," mused the Doctor, glad to be there.

During their time together, more adventures of madness and excitement had taken place — meeting Queen Victoria and a werewolf, the Krillitanes and Sarah Jane Smith, Reinette/Clockwork Droids, Cybermen, the Wire, Ood/Satan creature, Abzorbaloff, the Isolus but none of them compared to the biggest battle that would ultimately tear them apart.

In retrospect, Rose realised that she probably should've seen it coming so to speak. Earlier on the experiences that Sarah Jane went through during her time with the Doctor would've been something even a less intelligent person would've taken heed to but she had also said that some things were worth getting your heart broken for. The Doctor was certainly worth that.

That Satanic creature had also said to Rose that she was destined to die so very soon in battle, something which the Doctor dismissed but when landing on Earth, there had been a conversation between Rose and her mother where the latter warned her that she would not recognise herself one day.

Then the battle itself had seen both Daleks and Cybermen duking it out for supremacy. Rose had opted to fight by his side, abandoning her own family in a parallel but she had rationed that ever since she said yes to him the first time they had met that her choice had been made.

"Exterminate, exterminate," were the cries of many Daleks, heading to a fate worse than death.

"Delete, delete," screamed the Cybermen, releasing that they were goners.

Unfortunately for her, by having Pete save her from being sucked into the void, she was bound to a parallel world.

"I love you," came the cries of a saddened young woman, slowly realising that she was losing the man she loved.

"Quite right too," stifled the Doctor, trying not to lose it. "And if it's my last chance to say it, Rose Tyler …"

That sentence hadn't ended. That was something that both saddened and drove Rose insane for the longest of times. _What was the end of that sentence? What was he going to say? Did he love me?_

It had taken Rose a few weeks to adjust herself, to get up and face what was going on in this parallel. Although she hated it, she was stuck and she needed to concentrate on the positives. The Doctor would never want her to be miserable, nor would he want her to turn on the people that love her as well.

She may not have the Doctor but she had her parents, both of them together and she had a younger brother called Tony. She and Mickey had also managed to become friends without anything ever happening and even she and Jake became pals as well. Plus, seeing as she was using her alien knowledge to benefit Torchwood's regime, it didn't hurt that she also managed to get along with nearly everyone there.

For the most part, working with Torchwood meant swanning around in luxury SVU's, some administration work but the alien encounters certainly didn't lack. While she didn't have to worry for the latest Dalek or Cyberman to try and kill her, she had become fascinated by the Weevils and there was even an interesting moment when Torchwood had uncovered a pair of gloves with resurrection properties.

For the tiniest while she was beginning to put the Doctor to the back of her head and that was hard given that he invaded her headspace like a restless spirit, usually pleading to be saved.

Then the most interesting thing had happened. Rose and Jake had been in the canteen eating before Pete had instructed the both of them. "You need to see this now."

"What is it?" Jake mumbled, digesting his food and noticing that Mickey and two scientists were glued to a giant screen.

"Do you notice anything strange?" Mickey asked, not looking at either Jake or Rose in that moment.

Rose looked at the screen and at first, couldn't think of anything out of the ordinary. Then she looked again, noticing something that filled her with both dread and a modicum of excitement.

"The stars are going out," she gasped quietly, realising if this was happening, then it must be affecting the void, meaning that she could actually cross dimensions.

Despite rigorous warnings from everyone on board, Rose decided to use a dimension cannon to get to the Doctor. For all she knew, he could need her help and there was also the distinct possibility of being able to warn him if on the off chance he was unaware of what was happening. Either way she was going to see her Doctor.

Unfortunately what she did witness when she landed made her gasp in horror. She had landed on someone kind of spacecraft and heard very familiar screams. The kind that sounded agonising.

"Master, please, I'm sorry," the Doctor wept, pleading for an ounce mercy that he wasn't going to receive. "I didn't mean to try and escape. I won't do it again. Please, no-"

"Liar!" yelled the Master, his voice filled with implacable fury as he puts his hands on the Doctor's head and hits him with another mental assault. The Doctor's screams became so unbearable that Rose immediately ran to him.

However she never actually got to the Doctor and while it might have felt longer, when she returned, Mickey informed her that she was only gone for about twenty seconds.

"We have to go back," Rose panted, her mind not thinking clearly.

"You can't," Mickey sternly pointed out, then referring to the dimension cannon. "This thing is out of juice."

"But he needs me," Rose broke silently.

The next time she did return, she had wound up on an abandoned London street and saw the Doctor with a group of tourists but even then she wasn't able to stay long enough to make contact with him. There was a chance meeting with Donna and a few times she had tried to communicate via the TARDIS and some shuttle bus but it was only when Davros and the Daleks had attempted to destroy all of reality was she reunited with the Doctor.

"Never forget Doctor. You did this. I name you forever. You are the destroyer of the worlds," were the rantings of the mad creator. Rose caught the gist of them as she had gone in the TARDIS with everyone else.

Back on Bad Wolf Bay, Rose had been upset that the Doctor wasn't going to take her back. She had also expressed a certain amount of confusion when left with the Human Doctor as a result.

"New Doctor, what was the end of that sentence?"

"I love you," he whispered and they kissed, all the while the real Doctor and Donna had left.

All that Rose and this new Doctor did was hold hands and stare at each other. Even the arrival of Pete and Tony didn't break their distraction. This man looked like her Doctor and even shared the same thoughts, feelings and memories but Rose still didn't know if that did mean that she would love him in the same way.

Several months had passed since that final meeting with the Doctor and Donna on the beach. Time has certainly been interesting for Rose and the new Doctor, the man she had been left with. Not only did Rose realise she had to get used to a new man with the embodiment of everything she loved, but he himself had to get used to adjusting to life in one place.

To be fair, Rose had realised this wasn't the first time such confinement had been bestowed onto him. In his third incarnation he had been bound to the Earth when the Time Lords had tampered with his TARDIS. During this time he had worked extensively with UNIT as their chief scientist. While Torchwood wasn't exactly UNIT, it was close enough and this Doctor settled into a head scientific role with a fair amount of trepidation.

Adopting the name John Smith for legal reasons, the new Doctor had realised he was something of office gossip for the first few months. To them, he was the Doctor but at the same time he wasn't. This bugged him more than he'd let on. Telling Rose would've been an idea if sometimes he didn't feel that she also looked at him as if she was looking through him.

John Smith sat in his bedroom, in a reverie. Six months had passed since he was left on this world and him and Rose felt like strangers. He wondered if it was always going to be like this with her, if whether or not he should leave.

Jake had been sitting in traffic for the good part of forty minutes. He wasn't a man of extreme road rage but if the driver ahead of him didn't move in the next five minutes, he'd beep his horn so loud that all of London would come to a screeching halt.

"Your nostrils are flaring," Rose smiled at him as she had been sitting in the front seat with him. She had found herself spending more time with him than the Doctor recently.

"Are they?" Jake smiled tartly, then sighed a relief when the car ahead of him finally moved. "Progress at long last."

Rose just smiled as Jake finally found somewhere to park. The two of them stepped out of the car and decided to wander around in the hope of finding some clues. She had heard about recent Auton activities through an informant and wanted to investigate them.

"Not that I don't like spending time with you as a mate," Jake said, his eyes darting at certain shops, particularly ones with mannequins, "but shouldn't we have brought John along with us? He's the expert after all."

"We're not exactly on speaking terms," Rose breezed nervously. She really didn't want to admit that but couldn't see a way of not admitting it either.

"Because you keep treating him like he's a different person?"

"No!" Rose snapped defensively, then she realised that Jake wasn't convinced. "Yes. I thought I would be over it now."

"I don't mean to sound harsh, Rose but if you can't get over it, then you should let him go," Jake murmured. "And if you can, might I suggest you do before you end up driving him away."

"Thanks," Rose muttered.

"I never said I was an agony aunt," Jake smirked, then his voice trailed as he spotted something. "Usually I tend not to give people advice and did you just see what I saw?"

"Auton," Rose whispered. "We're weapon less. We need to retreat."

Before both of them could retreat, the Auton in question had spotted them and reacted by shooting from its arm, directly at them. Jake had pulled Rose away in time for the shot to hit a nearby car, nearly blowing it completely.

"Back to the car, now!" Rose instructed. As they ran to get weapons, the Auton had sloped off. Rose was unaware that it was being summoned.

John Smith had decided that a walk was needed. He had called into Torchwood and had a brief look around the place before overhearing two workers talking about Auton activity. This had also resulted in both him and Pete exchanging some tense words. John realised that he might have overreacted when he accused Pete of not trusting him but right now he needed to clear his head.

As he walked a fairly busy street, allowing himself to get lost in the crowd in a desperate need to be invisible, a van had slowly been following him since he left the Torchwood building. The van had then pulled up and a young woman stepped out. She was blonde, early twenties and with an impenetrable smile smeared across her face, she was least likely to be viewed by an untrained eye to be a villain.

"Hello," she smiled, extending her hand, in which the new Doctor took to shake. "I'm just wondering are you Doctor John Smith from Torchwood?"

"That depends," the new Doctor answered, now suddenly alarmed by the woman's presence. He didn't notice that a heavy man in his late forties had stepped out of the van behind him.

"I'll take that as a yes," the woman said, her smile disappearing and her voice sounding cold. "Secure him."

Before the new Doctor had time to take in her words, the older man clamped a rough cloth across his mouth. The new Doctor kicked and struggled to get away but soon found his vision fading and being unable to fight as soon as he was dragged into a van, which then drove off.

Rose and Jake had made their back into Torchwood where the atmosphere hadn't been all that warm. Tension could felt from a hundred miles and given that the work Torchwood did was sometimes stress personified; neither of them were all that surprised.

Rose went to see Pete in the boardroom. He was going through some files, not eager to pay much attention to his daughter As soon as she had discovered there had been an altercation between her and the new Doctor, Rose was more eager to find out what happened.

"He said we didn't trust him," Pete muttered. "Rose, we practically gave him one of the highest roles in Torchwood, what more do we have to do?"

"He's got a point though," Rose mumbled. "I mean I haven't exactly shown him that I trust him either. Maybe I should talk to him."

"Yeah, that would be a good idea," Pete conceded. "We can't have him around the place if he doesn't feel like he's appreciated. And also, we can't have that many distractions, not with this threat of an Auton invasion."

"I saw one of them today. It nearly killed me and Jake but it ran away, like it was being summoned away by something."

"Or someone."

That voice could only belong to Jackie Tyler. She had stepped into the boardroom with a file in her hand, a look of satisfaction on her face as she dropped the file on the table and then addressed her family.

"His name is Andrew Franklin. Arms dealer and from what I've been researching, he wants to bring London to its knees. You can say it, I'm a genius."

Both Rose and Pete looked suitably impressed with Jackie's findings. Modesty wasn't exactly something Jackie was famed for so she enjoyed it all the more when she could surprise them with her resourcefulness.

"So how do we find him?" Pete asked. Jackie stumbled for a second.

"Well, that's the thing …"

This part she hadn't nailed down just yet. Luckily, Jake was about to spare her any further embarrassment.

"You have to see this," Jake peered in, the words more of an order than a request. He gave Rose a look of pity. Immediately she had realised that something else had happened.

"Torchwood," smiled Andrew from the DVD that had been sent to them. "My name is Andrew Franklin and I have a bone to pick with you. About a year and a half ago, I planned to invade London via the Weevils but you stole my pets and reconditioned them."

They all stared, remembering the incident. Until now, they had never known who had been behind all those Weevils going savage. Now they had an answer and undoubtedly, another threat on their hands.

"I'm going to make it simple for you," Andrew continued. "My creatures of plastic are going to take over your organisation and you're going to let them."

This wasn't coming from the DVD, it was coming from inside. Marching could be heard and it was drawing closer and closer.

"Can you hear that?" asked Patrice, a young scientist, her heart skipping a beat in dread. A sense of dread that everyone in the room was feeling.

"They're coming," Jake said, reaching for a weapon.

"Actually, we're already here," Andrew smiled.

With him was a tall man in blue plimsolls with his hands tied behind his back. Rose recognised the man as the new Doctor. "You can thank him for letting us in. After we roughed him up of course. So foolishly loyal for a man who's treated like a leper by you lot."

"Let him go," Rose stammered, desperate to advance. The look in the new Doctor's eyes told her to back away.

"No," Andrew replied shortly, "He's ours now as are the rest of you." Andrew then bound the new Doctor to a chair by his waist.

"Stop this," the new Doctor said angrily.

He knew that Andrew only had three Autons at his disposal but they were enough to cause some serious damage to Torchwood. Andrew ignored him and Rose couldn't get near him. Three Autons had also entered the room.

"This is how it's going to go down," Andrew smiled at the captive organisation. "I'll take over control of Torchwood and through this organisation, the world will become ours. Those who fail to fall in line are going to die. No exceptions."

"What if we refuse?" Patrice stammered nervously, her hand nervously trying to find an available weapon on her desk but finding nothing of real use.

"I thought someone might ask that," Andrew smirked, then gazed at one of the Autons with malicious intent. "Kill her."

"Now that would be a very foolish thing to do."

That voice wasn't any of the Torchwood employees. Instead it could only belong to the new Doctor who was standing over them with a strange looking weapon in his hand, part gun and part satellite dish which he had remember leaving under Patrice's desk.

"How did you?" Andrew muttered angrily.

"Let's just say that Houdini showed me a few tricks," the new Doctor smirked victoriously. "As for you, I don't think you'll be terrorising London just yet."

Andrew backed away, taking out a teleport from his pocket, similar to the ones that Torchwood themselves owned. If he couldn't have London, then he'd certainly take pleasure in causing as much mayhem to Torchwood as he possibly could.

"Maybe not," he snarled at the new Doctor while turning to the Autons under his command, "but I can certainly rid the world of this demented organisation. Kill them all. Don't spare a single one."

As Andrew teleported away to safety, Torchwood then found them immersed in a battle with the Autons. Various machines were damaged, some employees were injured but luckily Pete and Jake's shooting skills saw all three Autons incinerated. When they were destroyed, there was a look from all of the staff to the new Doctor, one of welcome. The new Doctor smiled evenly and then him and Rose walked outside in the cold January air and looked at each other.

"How long are you going to stay with me?" Rose asked, her tone serious. For the first time she looked at him, just him and not as the shell of a man she once loved.

"Forever," the new Doctor smiled back at her, his look serious as it evolved into a look of kindness.

An understanding had been made, something had changed between the two of them. No longer were they going through the motions, they were on the same path. They'd have to find Andrew before he could assemble another alien race in order to take over London so as a team they scoured the city in pursuit of a dangerous man. The best part being that they both wanted to be on the same team.

- The End -


End file.
